The great detached bulks of the buildings that the carriage passed gleamed with lights, for Folsom Street was still the home of the elect. From the arch of lofty porches hall lamps cast a faint gleam into the outer darkness of shrubberies and lawns. Through the scroll-work of high iron gates the imbedded flags of the marble paths shone white between darkly grassed borders. Here and there a black façade was cut into by rows of long, lighted windows, uncurtained and unshuttered. The street suggested seclusion, wealth and dignity. The fortunes, which were later to erect huge piles on San Francisco’s wind-swept hill-crests, had not yet arisen to blight the picturesqueness of the gray, sea-girdled city. His own house was one of the largest in the street. Now, in the darkness, it loomed an irregular black mass, cut into with squares and slits of light. Just a month before the lease of his tenants had expired, and he was able to see one, at least, of his dreams realized--Alice’s daughters quartered under his roof. The revolution of Fortune’s wheel had been, where the Allens were concerned, sudden and dizzying. The ledge, that man for years had fruitlessly sought, in one night had been laid bare. Even for the time and the country it was a startling reversal of conditions. In the spring Beauregard Allen had been a beggar. In the summer he saw himself a man of wealth. Experts pronounced the discovery one of moment. The mine, called the Barranca, was regarded as richer in promise than the Buckeye Belle. Distant portions of the tract, which had come into his possession in so unlooked for a manner, were sold for large sums. The whole region was shaken into astonished animation and Foleys was more effectually wakened from the dead than it would have been by the Colonel’s original scheme. Allen’s sloth and despondency fell from him like a garment. With the ready money from the land sales he at once began the development of the prospect hole. In July a square tunnel mouth and a board shed intruded on the sylvan landscape near the landslide. In September a fair-sized hoisting works housed the throb of engines and the roll of cars. The noise of Beauregard Allen’s strike went abroad through foot-hill California and its echo rolled to San Francisco, where men who had known him in the early days suddenly remembered him as “Beau” Allen, the handsome Southerner, who had come to grief and dropped out of sight in the fifties.